The lesson for today is: Don’t underestimate Nick Clegg

Wednesday 12 May 2010 10:51 BST

From zero to hero, back to zero and now . . . deputy prime minister. Few politicians in the modern era have undergone such extreme turns of fortune as Nick Clegg.

At the start of the campaign he was accompanied by Vince Cable, the party man the public recognised. After the debate, as the term "Cleggmania" was coined, he was likened to Barack Obama. Then the election tyre endured a slow puncture.

Undeterred, and with seemingly inexhaustible reserves of steel, Clegg set about the task of ensuring himself a place in history, taking his party into government with its most unlikely of allies. He was denounced as a traitor, a harlot and as Robert Mugabe, but in the end he prevailed.

The experience will guide Clegg in the tortuous period ahead. His coalition with David Cameron will suffer excruciating pain and many a crisis.

Many Liberal Democrats will be holding their noses, happy to see their man installed as the second-most-powerful figure in the land but wary of the choice of bedfellow and anxious of the sacrifices already made.

But, if Clegg ultimately gets his way, this is the future. Even without electoral reform, the Lib-Dems have found themselves in the position of opting for Tweedledum or Tweedledee. There is nothing ignoble in this. Indeed, this is what a more proportional voting system will deliver in perpetuity.

So what happened to the so-called "progressive alliance" that would have united the Lib-Dems and Labour? Many have pointed to the parliamentary arithmetic. But there is a bigger problem, which Clegg identified more than a year ago in a pamphlet in which he claimed his party could become the standard-bearer of the liberal centre-Left. Many in Labour, particularly the older generation, epitomise a tribal form of politics, with authoritarian and hidebound instincts.

That is why Clegg spoke late last night of not just a new government, but a new kind of government, in which policy disagreements are thrashed out and a compromise is arrived at.

He has had to give ground on immigration, Europe, Trident, married couples' tax breaks and more. He has won on the first steps to a gradual raising of the tax threshold, a pupils' premium for disadvantaged children and several measures on political reform. Something is considerably better than the nothing of the past 65 years.

The honeymoon will be long over by the time the emergency budget is delivered in 50 days' time, prescribing the first dose of deficit-reducing pain. There will be huge battles ahead as poll ratings drop, MPs look over their shoulders angrily and Labour's new leader proclaims "I told you so".

Already on the first day the news was grim, with unemployment rising and strikes looming. Lib-Dems, so used to shouting from the sidelines, will have to learn quickly on the job. Their leader, it seems, has already done so.

If there is one lesson from this extraordinary past month, it is not to underestimate Nick Clegg, the man who more than any other has changed the face of British politics.